


Age of Consent

by pallidiflora



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Age Difference, Guilt, Loss of Virginity, M/M, jailbait wait, unhealthy relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 05:51:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12029517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallidiflora/pseuds/pallidiflora
Summary: While waiting for Peter's seventeenth birthday, Tony Stark obeys the letter of the law, if not the spirit.





	Age of Consent

**Author's Note:**

> [spacemonkey42](http://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemonkey42/pseuds/spacemonkey42) has been kind enough to translate this into Chinese, which you can check out [here!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12056445)

I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.  
When I speak passionately,  
that’s when I’m least to be trusted.  
_-Louise Glück, The Untrustworthy Speaker_

 

It was a few weeks until Peter Parker's seventeenth birthday. For the occasion, Aunt May had bought a set of number candles—purple one, green seven. She set these aside in advance, Peter said, along with three different cake mixes: devil's food, white, yellow; _you're graduating, you're turning seventeen, it's a big deal!_

He had told Tony these details both abashedly and with a nervous, self-effacing excitement. _She's going nuts over it,_ he said, as though it was not something he—they—had been looking forward to for half a year. Half a year ago, Peter still sixteen—sweet sixteen, an age that left a faint sugary film on the tongue, a fuzz on the teeth, cloying—that was when, upper lip shining with sweat, Peter had let their knees touch, had said _I know this is dumb, Mr. Stark, but I just—you're just really—_

Tony was turning forty-nine at the end of May. Another year and he would be fifty, a rounded number that held within it a certain kind of finality, however much Rhodey kept calling it _nifty fifty, baby, nifty fifty_. Other men, in midst of a midlife crisis, bought luxury cars, or fucked busty twenty-something blondes, or got divorced, or kickboxed and ate kale salads. They changed careers or took up hobbies built on nostalgia's scrapheap—tinkering with robots, flying remote-controlled planes. The problem was that Tony had done all of that already, and thus some primal, lab-rat part of his hindbrain—the part that hammered away at the proverbial pellet-dispensing button heedless of any consequences—had wanted something different. Or the same—all the elements rolled into one—only more so: the risk, the childhood appeal, the sleaze and wholesomeness in equal measure. This was how he rationalized it now. He did not want to think of waiting for Peter's seventeenth birthday as the locus of another—third? fourth?—midlife crisis, though. He did not want to think of it as a crisis at all.

It was only natural, then, when Peter had let their knees touch, saying _I know this is dumb, Mr. Stark, but I just—you're just really—_ (really what? Swell? Nifty? There was something about him reminiscent of 1950s comic book characters, with their collared shirts and sweaters and their neatly side-parted hair, a clean-cut look he had not until now found erotic.) It was only natural that he had said _look, I know, kid,_ and had patted his knee, understanding, warmly but distantly paternal—but had not stopped Peter from reaching out and, with a palm clammy with the sweat of adolescent panic, cupping his face. He placated himself now, six months later, by telling himself he had tried to be stern. Gentle but firm in a way his own father had never mastered. (He had not: been stern, been firm. But then, he was not a father. It was important to remember that, sometimes.) It was true that he'd said _you know we can't do this. Not right now._ It was just that when Peter said _what about later?_ he had not—as he might have liked to imagine himself doing, retelling this story, heroically, humorously, an anecdote for when Peter was older, as an uncle might—he had not stood up, brushed off the knees of his jeans, said _well, kiddo, time to get you home. Almost midnight, wouldn't want you turning into a pumpkin._ Something defusing, jocular and final. Instead, he had thought _what_ about _later_ , and had stroked his thumb along the back of Peter's hand. Out loud, he said _we'll just keep it above board 'til then, alright?_

He had let Peter kiss him on the cheek then, mouth closed; he had, in anticipation, wet his lips, and they left behind the slight impression of a warmth and wetness that felt almost unbearably sexual in their innocence.

 

* * *

 

 _So you... you and um, Ms. Potts, you're not still...?_ Peter had broached this subject when they'd sat down—one o'clock in the morning, less stares—at a pumpkin-and-cobweb-festooned Denny's. Under their shared booth table, the tip of Tony's foot rested—initially by accident—against Peter's, who had not moved away, only smiled the furtive, awkward smile of someone who was not accustomed to going on dates. ( _Is this a date?_ Peter also asked as they drove. _Are we... dating?_ Deflecting, Tony said _if I was taking you on a date it would not be to a chain restaurant with a value menu._ )

Going to Denny's was, as he'd so genteelly put it, _above board._ Working—as they had done earlier that day—sitting in separate chairs, not touching, was also _above board._ He was doing nothing wrong—though a moralizing voice, which he supposed was his conscience and which sounded a little like Steve Rogers, tut-tutted at him: _if you have to say it... Actions speak louder than words, Tony!_ But letting his foot rest—casually, innocuously, invisibly—against that of a sixteen-year-old's was not, in the state of New York, a felony.

 _They don't serve drinks here, do they? Like real drinks? Guess not. I should start carrying a hip flask with me, y'know, like a cowboy. Anyway, no, Ms. Potts—who, by the way, sounds like an anthropomorphic singing teapot coming from you—we are not still..._ He trailed off as Peter had, gesturing with both hands. _Have a little more faith in me than that._

Peter flushed. _I just wasn't sure... I mean I don't know if this is—y'know, if we're..._

The same Steve Rogers voice (or was it his father's? The same jovial patriarch voice he'd used in commercials) nagged at him with the all sprightliness of a 1940s PSA about syphilis: _you can still end this! Do the right thing! C'mon, champ!_ He still had the wedding ring Pepper had returned to him, secreted away in a Tiffany bag somewhere in his closet, along with his MIT ring and a pair of his father's cufflinks he'd not had the heart to sell. The responsible thing to do, he'd thought then, would be to dig it out, proffer it again with all the promises he could muster— _it'll be different this time, we can make it work,_ and, of course, his favourite: _I can be better._ The responsible thing to do would be to return to the warm, safe drudgery of shared meals, arguments over stray toenail clippings, passable sex, holidays spent in companionable and forgettable silence. The idea of this ring—round and final as the number fifty—made the back of his neck prickle.

 _Let's just take it slow,_ he'd said. _There's still plenty of time. In the meantime, you want the junior birthday cake pancakes or the dino nuggets?_

 _Hilarious,_ Peter said.

 _There's still plenty of time._ He reflected on that as they made their order. Plenty of time before... what, exactly? _Before I can fuck you_ is what he realized he'd meant. To think on finally fucking him—being _allowed_ to fuck him, as though it was an immense and generous concession—made his mouth dry. In theory there was little appealing about a virgin—who wanted to put up with inept blowjobs, nervous tittering, fucking with the lights off? That was what he always said, but he knew, intimately, equally, both the desire to efface something just because it was there and the desire to plant a flag on a hill. He considered his former need to blow up mountain ranges in Afghanistan, to build an obvious penis-metaphor of a tower with his name on it—his previous midlife crises; these had been sublimated into a singular need to be the first, best and only man Peter Parker ever fucked.

In subsequent months, he thought more than once of finding someone else to fuck. A young kid—though not _that_ young—a brunette, a university student, maybe, with whom he could fool around once or twice; fuck them from behind so all he could see would be the flat, anonymous planes of their backs. Get it out of his system. He could download Grindr or Tinder, set up a phony profile, post only pictures of his thumbs hooked into the waistband of his boxers, the scar on his chest out of frame. He could, he could— _Jesus Christ, Tony. If you want a depressing orgasm, that's what porn is for._ Besides, he couldn't do that to Peter. Peter, who was a better person than he was, would have never done the same. Peter was the type of person who would say _pick on someone your own size;_ it would not have occurred to him to say _fuck someone your own age._

 _Get ahold of yourself. Keep it in your pants,_ he said to himself then. The finger-wagging voice, this time that of his father in private: _stop playing with that. Put it away._

 

* * *

 

For the infrequent times they were alone together, Tony had at first deemed kissing on the mouth off-limits, recalling the words of the erstwhile nanny he'd still had at age fourteen— _none of that now. No hanky-panky. Hanky-panky,_ back then, had meant anything that went beyond the bounds of hand-holding. At forty-eight, however, _no hanky-panky_ bordered on a kind of self-flagellation, a decorum that at his age was absurd. Faced with Peter squirming, pleading _can't we please, nobody's gonna know_ —what was he to do? _Be the adult_ was the obvious answer, but that he didn't give in and fuck him then and there required a self-restraint he had never before had cause to exercise. Anything short of fucking him, then, was a sign of virtue—if it felt the way drinking chlorophyll smoothies instead of whiskey did, it was proof he was doing nothing wrong.

He revised his rules. When they kissed they were to keep their hands above the waist, as at a high school dance. (Did they still have those kinds of rules nowadays? He remembered prom, 1985, silver tinsel, pink balloons, smuggling a flask of his dad's bourbon under his suit jacket, sharing a joint in the bathroom. That was thirty-four years ago now. Peter hadn't even been born.) There also was to be no neck-kissing, no love-bites, not even the unbuttoning of the top buttons of the shirt. (God forbid that anyone's collarbones be exposed. He felt as though he was living in a monastery. He felt as though he was wearing a hair shirt.) _I just don't want anybody getting in trouble, okay?_ By _anybody_ he had meant himself. _I don't see what difference it makes,_ Peter would say, and Tony would reply _you, of all people, want to help me break the law?_

 _It's different,_ Peter said.

_Different how?_

_It just is._

Boundaries thus expanded, what had once been intolerable look-but-don't-touch stares, pecks on the forehead, hugs with groins a circumspect half-foot apart, became slow, wet, lingering kisses in the backs of Tony's cars, the way teenagers might. (Though it was not _might._ It was not hypothetical. Peter _was_ a teenager.) Tony remembered those encounters, at fifteen, sixteen, in his father's Benz (a stately, roomy, respectable car, one quietly assured of its worth, unlike any car he'd ever chosen for himself); he remembered the surreptitiousness, the sense of trespass, the erections almost unbearable in their intensity—though at age fifteen, Tony had not limited himself with kindergarten-style keep-your-hands-to-yourself rules. To think on Peter experiencing those same kinds of erections with no outlet nearly made him light-headed with arousal.

It was early March; they'd gone to the Museum of Natural History on the flimsy pretense of seeing an exhibit about spiders. He had spent the day wondering if it was a mistake, torturing himself with a hand between Peter's shoulder blades that, at a distance, could look appropriate, fatherly; sometimes he would let his hand rest at the nape of Peter's neck—the faint, damp warmth of the short hairs there having a perverse intimacy to them—and Peter would lean into the touch.

 _It's chilly,_ he said. _I'll give you a ride home._ He parked on a side-street and pretended to listen to the radio, with the insipid whining that passed as rock music these days. (God, was that what he sounded like? That was the sort of thing his father used to say: _it's no wonder you're like this, all that music you listen to. It's all about killing yourself._ ) Peter had said _can I kiss you? I mean, like, really kiss you—_ as though he was being chivalrous, as though Tony's permission was the one that mattered. When they'd gotten into the back seat, the word _premeditated_ was all Tony could think of. It took him too long to notice that Peter's hand was on his thigh, lightly squeezing, a gesture that in other contexts was harmless enough for grandparents in the sitting room; it made his cock twitch. He pulled out of the kiss. Peter breathed _Tony_ against his mouth. (He had been instructed to call him by his first name, as _Mr. Stark_ had too much of a _Don't Stand So Close to Me_ vibe— _young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy_ and all that. He was beginning to think that this, too, was a misstep— _Tony_ had such different connotations. _Tony_ was what he was called in bed.)

 _Stop, stop,_ Tony said. _W_ _e have to stop._

Sitting as they were, hips chastely apart, Peter would have had a clear view of Tony's cock in his pants, straining against the zipper, surely imagining the size and shape of him. Tony, similarly, could envision in his mind's eye the wet spot on Peter's boxers. He could see him, afterward, in his tiny bedroom with its Star Wars figures, the baseball pennant on the wall, the thin lumpy quilt and algebra textbooks, a setting normally without any particular erotic charm; he could see Peter shimmying his jeans and boxers halfway down his thighs, stumbling, scarcely able to wait, jerking himself furiously, coming almost as soon as his back hit his bed. Whimpering, helpless, into the sleeve of his sweater.

 _I think it's past your bedtime_ was all that he said.

 _I'll just—um—_ Peter had then tucked his hard-on into the waistband of his jeans while Tony looked away. After Peter waved him goodbye, ensconced in the well-lit safety of his apartment's entranceway, Tony leaned his forehead against the steering wheel and breathed—in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Envisioning all of this later—the ordinary room, the details: the ravelling cuff of a sleeve, his hair sticking to his temple, the quality of his gasps (rhythmic but abbreviated), imagining Peter imagining him, how he might feel inside him, though this was as yet an unknown sensation, exciting and frightening in its possibilities—all these things together made Tony come so hard it left him with a pounding headache. He drank a dram of scotch, took two Advils and, ill-advised, a sleeping pill, and slept 'til eleven the next day, feeling when he woke as though he'd been hit by a truck.

 

* * *

 

At the end of April, Peter sent him a picture: himself, bookended by a pair of friends, blowing out two candles—purple one, green seven. The candlelight threw into sharp relief a pimple on Peter's chin—an admonitory, visceral reminder of both his honesty and his youth. Following this was a text: _when can I see you?_

To delay, Tony sent him a YouTube clip: The Ramones singing Happy Birthday on the Simpsons, a clip nearly a decade older than Peter but one he was sure he'd appreciate. Then, finally: _I'll let you know. Happy birthday!_ He added a few other things—a heart, an ironic middle-finger, and, after a minute's deliberating, an eggplant—before deleting them. He was still leery of putting what he truly wanted to say in text— _I can't wait to fuck you. I want to split you open._ The vehemence with which he wanted to say these things, things that were crude and almost mean in their explicitness, surprised him, but it was too soon to lose his head entirely.

Thinking of what to get him brought to mind the last birthday he and Pepper had spent together. He'd taken her to lunch, she'd worn a new dress, people had pointed their phones at them in every direction on the walk from the car; over drinks, he'd presented her with a Harry Winston bracelet, diamond and sapphire. She looked at it in silence for a moment, smiling a half-smile; he said _do you like it?_ She sighed, wan though still tolerant. _I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but this is what you gave me last year._ He'd wanted to argue, but trusted her memory better than his own. She continued: _did you find this in a closet somewhere and re-wrap it?_ No matter what he'd said, he'd sound like a schoolchild with their hand in the cookie jar, so what he said was as close to the truth as he could manage: _I don't know, Pepper, you know how things have been lately, you know how bad I am at this kind of thing—_

 _Never mind,_ she interrupted. _It's fine._ They then ordered enough Manhattans to leave them both stumbling, and went to bed—Pepper still in her make-up, Tony still in his suit—without having sex. He would think about Peter's present later.

He did not set a date for them to meet until it turned to May, his own birthday looming at the end of the month, glowing like a lighthouse beacon, hopeful, ominous. He held off, he told himself, because Peter had been busy—studying for tests, applying for colleges (though he'd said he might take a year off, who knew), preparing for a prom at which he would not drink and would not slow-dance with anyone. In reality it was because he didn't know what he would do, faced with a Peter he had permission to sleep with. Eventually, he sent:  _h_ _ow's next weekend for you? I'll pick you up, we can go out for dinner. Somewhere nicer than Denny's, if you're good._ He had not gotten him a present.

 _I can't wait,_ Peter replied. Tony made a reservation at a restaurant he didn't especially like—the dishes too pretentious, the waitstaff too servile—but was brashly expensive, which lent it a vulgarity he appreciated. It was something he could joke about— _if I wanted whatever_ creamed basil _is I'd seat myself at an old-folks' home_ —but could also be used as proof of his seriousness, of his good will. _See, look,_ he could say, pulling out the receipt, _I didn't cheap out._

Peter, when Tony arrived to pick him up, was dressed up in the sweetly self-conscious way that young people had. He had on a button-up and a blazer over dark slacks, and had gelled his hair within an inch of its life; the pimple on his chin was mostly faded. The blazer had the air of something bought and worn once for school picture day; his shoes, also, looked brand new—had he begged his aunt for the money, bought them on clearance? Tony noted these things with both a tenderness and a shame that, together, were painful in his gut.

He decided not to drink at dinner, wanting to keep what remained of his wits about him. Peter had the starry-eyed, bewildered look of someone who'd never so much as passed by a restaurant so expensive. ( _Loukhoum? Orgeat? What the hell are those?_ he'd whispered in a panic, reading off the desserts. Tony said _I know, right?_ ) Still, he felt emboldened, being on the other side of seventeen, and under the white tablecloth he ran the tip of his shoe up the cuff of Tony's slacks; he did this without looking at him, embarrassed and pleased with himself, with the theatrical, tawdry air of something out of a period film. Tony raised his eyebrows at him, in good humour. Tony's dinner remained mostly uneaten—pickled this, emulsion of that, barely edible as far as he was concerned; besides, he wasn't hungry. He wanted a martini. Though it had been a few years, he wanted a cigarette. To compromise, he pulled two pre-wrapped Rolaids out of his back pocket and chewed them slowly.

He could scarcely bear the sight of Peter eating his dessert—the genuine pleasure, the innocence, the gusto. ( _Wow. That was... amazing._ Forgetting himself, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, licking his lips. _I've never had anything like it._ ) He thought to himself _in another few hours I'll be fucking him._ It made him almost ill with the powerful, defiant desire of those who'd denied themselves; a part of him wanted to announce it to the room, just because he could. (He had every right to. Wasn't that the entire point?)

They got into the car, drove southwest a few minutes, sat in traffic.

"Where are we going?" Peter said. With a sidelong glance in the mirror, he smoothed his hair.

"Hotel," Tony said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He had begun to perspire under his suit jacket. "Fancy. Chocolates on the pillows. Or not on the pillows exactly, they don't do that anymore. Not sanitary. Anyway, you'll love it."

After a moment, Peter said "oh. I was just thinking... never mind."

He was thinking they'd fuck in Tony's bed. It was, of course, his _first time_ —spoken of with reverence, anticipated, feared; that Tony could scarcely remember his own did not mean Peter didn't want his to be special. The intimacy of another person's bed, their belongings, their life—he wanted to see the books on his shelves, the contents of his dresser drawers. He wanted to see his toothbrush, he wanted to be let in. He wanted to be legitimized. There was no intimacy to be had in fucking in a hotel, with its antiseptic sheets, its wrapped soaps, its transitory occupants, its anonymity.

"Listen, I just don't think going upstate is a good idea," Tony said. "And if I don't think it's a good idea—think of it like a honeymoon," he finished, perhaps unwisely.

"No, I didn't—it's okay! I'm not complaining." Shyly, he reached over and placed a hand in the crook of his elbow; involuntarily, Tony jerked at the touch.

"Careful," he said. "Might cause an accident."

They arrived past eleven o'clock. Tony entered their room without taking anything in, all the things he knew to be there from previous visits: fresh flowers on all the surfaces, black-and-white art, Oscar de la Renta toiletries in the bathroom. Instead, he made a beeline for the edge of the bed, removed his shoes and tie. On the immaculate bedspread he wiped his palms, which had gathered a layer of sweat in the creases.  
  
"Whoa," Peter breathed. "This is... this is, like, way too much."

"I know." For something to do, Tony was now removing his socks. A more gallant part of him wanted to say _we don't have to do this right now. We can just talk, or watch TV, or rack up a huge room service bill. We can just sleep._ He found the words wouldn't come out.

He caught Peter running his tongue over his teeth.

"I'm just gonna go to the bathroom," he said, and emerged later looking scrubbed raw, smelling, now, of toothpaste and strong, citrusy soap. Without saying anything, he reached for Tony's face; his hands were greasy, lotioned a moment ago. The thought that Peter had, desiring to please him, taken the time to rub lotion into his hands, felt to him stupidly, dizzyingly, oppressively arousing.

The small noise Peter let out when pressed into the bed made Tony feel like he'd taken a punch to the gut. He situated himself between Peter's legs—flung outward, bent at the knees—and covered him bodily; Peter had his arms wrapped around Tony's shoulders, had a leg hooked around his calf. As a testament to his age, he was already rock-hard against Tony's thigh. Tony ground against him once, and Peter stifled a noise against his shoulder, one of self-conscious, alarmed pleasure; he shuddered, went rigid, stilled, pushed himself up onto his elbows.

"Shit, I'm sorry, I—"

Tony interrupted him, mouthing along his jawline: _it's okay, it's okay..._ He took hold of one of Peter's wrists, pressed his palm against his fly.

"Feel that?" he said. "That's how bad I want you." He was aware that those words, in this setting—a lurid, overblown encounter in a hotel room—had a sort of flatness to them, a seediness. Coming from someone else, said to someone else, would have rendered them unbelievable.

Peter swallowed. "Me too, I want you to—"

Tony fucked him single-mindedly, selfishly. It had been a long time since he'd slept with someone who wore their gratitude with such nakedness; who looked at him with such expectation, such awe. Whose expression was all at once pinched, overwhelmed, avid but unselfish— _please, please, you're so_ —

"Get yourself off for me," Tony gasped. "Show me what you look like."

Peter applied himself to his orgasm the way he would a math problem—eager, dutiful, the proverbial worker bee—and it was that goodness that finally sent Tony over the edge: the guilelessness in his eyes before he gasped _oh_ and his face crumpled as if expecting a blow, as if in pain.

Tony sat, afterward, on the edge of the bed, now rumpled, close with sex; he had made himself a whiskey and water and was drinking it in immoderate gulps.

"You still hungry?" he said. "I'm still hungry. Those dinners never fill me up. Club sandwich? Burger? Something from the Starbucks up the street?"

"Oh, um, no, I'm alright. You don't have to. Thanks, though." He kept smiling to himself, a sheepish, private smile in which Tony was complicit.

He ordered room service anyway—french fries—and walked in circles eating them while Peter watched TV. That was the worst part about sex: the stretches of unfilled time afterward, the boredom, the unwanted clarity. It was so easy to be rational after orgasm. He kissed Peter on the forehead and went to take a shower, soaping himself with the frivolous, expensive soap, washing his cock without any interest in it. It was, then, just an inconvenient body part, like an extra limb or a toe where a finger should be.

When he exited the bathroom, Peter was asleep, the white comforter pulled up to his chin. It struck him, then, the ordinariness of his appearance. A face devoid of pretense, malice, ulterior motives; floating, marooned, in a gaudy hotel room. Tony wondered, flatly, almost detachedly: _what_ have _I done?_

Hating the idea already, compelled by guilt, he resolved to buy him a belated birthday present, an expensive, impractical token: a watch, a bottle of cologne, a new car.

**Author's Note:**

> Do you find this happens all the time  
> Crucial point one day becomes a crime  
> And I'm not the kind that likes to tell you  
> Just what I want to do  
>  _-New Order, Age of Consent_


End file.
